Boston suspects' homeland has seen decades of war, terror

The body of a Russian soldier lies near a group of Chechen fighters outside the presidential palace in central Grozny in this 1994 photograph taken during the separatist war. ﻿

MAKHACHKALA, Russia — Russia's volatile North Caucasus region, which the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombings once called home, has seen two decades of brutal fighting between Russian forces and separatists bent on carving out an independent Islamic state.

There was no information on any possible links between the suspects and any insurgent group. The Chechen government described Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev as ethnic Chechens whose family left Chechnya long ago and moved to Central Asia.

Before moving to the United States a decade ago, their uncle said, the brothers lived briefly in Makhachkala, the capital of Dagestan. Their father lives there now.

The conflict in Chechnya began in 1994 as a separatist war but quickly morphed into an Islamic insurgency dedicated to forming an Islamic state in the Caucasus. Dagestan has since become the epicenter of the insurgency.

Russian troops withdrew from Chechnya in 1996 after the first Chechen war, leaving it de-facto independent and largely lawless, but then rolled back in three years later after apartment building explosions in Moscow and other cities blamed on the rebels.

Russia faced strong international criticism for its indiscriminate use of force against civilians and other rights abuses in Chechnya. The two separatist wars killed an estimated 100,000 people, and Russian bombing reduced most of Chechnya's capital, Grozny, and other towns and villages to rubble, sending tens of thousands fleeing.

Chechnya has stabilized under the steely grip of Kremlin-backed local strongman Ramzan Kadyrov, a former rebel whose forces have been accused of severe human rights abuses. But the Islamic insurgency has spread to neighboring provinces, with Dagestan — sandwiched between Chechnya and the Caspian Sea — becoming the epicenter of violence. Militants launch daily attacks against police and other authorities.

Militants from Chechnya and neighboring provinces have carried out a long series of terrorist attacks in Russia, including a 2002 raid of a Moscow theater, in which 129 hostages died, a 2004 hostage-taking at a school in the southern city of Beslan that killed more than 330 people, and numerous bombings in Moscow and other cities.